


Insomnia

by orsaverba



Category: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: M/M, Monster / Human, light gore, mentions of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-08-12 23:59:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7954144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orsaverba/pseuds/orsaverba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his new room in the pretty manor, the one with the immaculate yard and flawless interior, like something out of a staged photograph, he had started counting the stitches in his pillowcase and the leaves in the tree outside. After a few days, he gave up counting those and instead began counting the number of roses protruding from the ribcage of the thing that sat in the corner of his room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insomnia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dragonofeternal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofeternal/gifts).



> This was initially a prompt on Tumblr that got wildly away from me. Thank you Liz for giving me the chance to write this, even if it was entirely unintentional.

When he was little, someone once told him to count sheep. Judal did so for a time, until the sheep started turning up with bloody wool and limping on broken hooves, then he remembered it was his mind he was trying to escape to begin with. He counted other things after that. The stars out the grimy orphanage window, the ants trailing along the windowsill in the moonlight, the cracks in the ceiling. Sometimes he’d count the strands of hair he’d tugged out if he’d had an attack that day, or the scratches on his arms.

 

Sleep had evaded Judal for as long as he could remember. Or, maybe it had always been very welcoming, but what lay beyond its open arms had always given him pause. His various psychologists had liked to give it fancy labels and dress it up like a prize pony to be shown at the fair. Repressed this and traumatic that. He’d seen his parents get gutted and mutilated before he could even remember their faces, of course he had night terrors every time he closed his fucking eyes.

 

In his new room in the pretty manor, the one with the immaculate yard and flawless interior, like something out of a staged photograph, he had started counting the stitches in his pillowcase and the leaves in the tree outside. After a few days, he gave up counting those and instead began counting the number of roses protruding from the ribcage of the  _thing_  that sat in the corner of his room.

 

It was fifty-six. They were rotted the next night.

 

The  _thing_  never showed up during the day, but Judal wasn’t really sure if that was because it wasn’t actually there or it just didn’t like the sunlight. At night though, as soon as he’d laid himself down on the too-comfortable bed, there it was. It lurked in the corner and somehow the shadows managed to smother it even though it looked too big to even fit in the spaces not occupied by furniture. Whenever he thought about it too hard, the room seemed to start warping and shivering at the edges, so he tried not to.

 

It had a lot of eyes. Five on its face, four pretty blue ones, two stacked on either side of its face, and a red one gaping open like a raw wound in its forehead. There were also eyes on its arms though, and sometimes its stomach, and occasionally its hands. ( It had many hands, and many arms, six last Judal saw but he could never be sure. ) The eyes glowed like electric lights, so even if the rest of it was impossible to see, Judal could always see the wide open eyes staring at him from the corner. Other than the five on its “face”, the other eyes seemed to like to open and close at random.

 

Whatever it was, it couldn’t seem to decide if it was living or dead. Its upper half seemed to be an almost human torso, though it was longer than it should have been, and thinner, and when it shifted into the moonlight there were black markings inked on its skin. From the waist area down, though, it became an undulating, snakelike thing that seemed to be made of roots and bones. It had laid with a portion of itself in the light one night. Judal had counted three stomachs, two sets of lungs, several coils of internal organs and three kidneys through its open skeleton. He wondered what held them in, then decided maybe nothing, and that’s what it had so many.

 

The thing never really stopped Judal from staring at it either. It would stare back from its corner, unmoving and unblinking, until Judal would finally nod off after finishing his counting for the night. It was gone in the morning, but the smell of fermenting roses always hung around that part of his room.

 

Judal never mentioned the  _thing_  to his new mother, or his psychologist. Actually, he hadn’t seen his psychologist in a while, and the last of his sleep medication had run out almost two months ago. But his new mother wanted a perfect child, and he could play the part well enough to be convincing. That kind of monotonous day to day became natural after a while, even if it left him feeling mechanical.

 

Judal lay there at night, counting the first thing to catch his eye. It was hours past when he had laid down. The  _thing_  had been staring at him unblinkingly as he counted.

 

“…Did you know,” he spoke up suddenly, the first time he’d  _ever_  spoken to the  _thing_. “That you have exactly one hundred and twenty-three thorns on the vine wrapped around your thirty-second rib?”

 

For the first time, the  _thing_  blinked at him. Its lengthy body undulated as it moved, slithering serpentine over itself. Judal saw it thin to the point of a tail, his only indication the  _thing’s_  body ever ended. 

 

“I did not.” it said. Its voice rippled through the air, like it came from a great distance. Judal couldn’t tell if it was deep or not, if it was comforting or unnerving, just that it tickled his ears and made him want to crane his neck to hear it better. “Do you know how many are on the thirty-third rib?”

 

“No. I haven’t counted those yet.”

 

The  _thing’s_  body continued slithering, its movements unending. It took Judal a moment to realize that it was moving towards him, the shadows clinging to it like tar and pulling reluctantly away as it made its way closer. 

 

It was more like a dragon than a snake, Judal realized. If one overlooked its excess arms ( there were six, just like he’d thought ) and winking eyes, the  _thing’s_  torso seemed almost human. At the waist however, skin was stitched with living roots that plunged beneath its flesh and seemed to tether it to the rest of its skeletal body. The roots and vines, dotted with blossoms and thorns, made a lacework through a long body supported by four legs with ugly, hooked claws at the end. On the inside, the roots all stuck like needles into a mess of organs, half of which Judal couldn’t name.

 

“What else have you counted?” the  _thing_  asked him, settling its serpentine body beside his bed and looming over him. Its hair was long and silky, spilling ink over its pale skin. Half its body looked mutilated.

 

“You have twenty-six eyes on your arms.” Judal answered. “But sometimes you only have fourteen. You only move your hands once every fifty-two minutes, unless it’s a full moon, then you move them every thirty-seven minutes and fifty-five seconds. The number of roses keeps changing. So do the number of organs. Do you have a heart?”

 

“Just one.”

 

“Oh. That wouldn’t be much help to count.”

 

“Why do you count things?”

 

“It helps me sleep.”

 

“Does it?”

 

“No, not really.”

 

The  _thing_  nodded as if this made all the sense in the world. It had a very pretty face, Judal decided. Half of it was disfigured, like its body, but its eyes were very lovely and it had a pretty mouth that looked blood red inside every time it talked. Judal wanted to count its teeth. It seemed to have too many.

 

It rested one of its hands on Judal’s forehead, smoothing clawed fingers through his long hair. One set of arms rested their elbows on the bed as it leaned over him, the others pulled the blankets up over his shoulders and pet his hair.

 

“I will sing you a lullaby,” the  _thing_  hummed. “My sister used to sing it to me when I was small.”

 

“Will you stay after I fall asleep?”

 

“I will count your breaths.”

 

When the  _thing_  sang the air trembled and wept. Judal curled up on his side, as close to the edge of his bed as he could, and rested his cheek in one of its palms. It stroked his cheek as it sang, its thumb brushing his bottom lip.

 

In the morning, it was gone, but that night it was in his room again. This time it pulled itself from the cloying shadows the moment he laid his eyes on it, smiling with perfect cherub lips that hid its many teeth. It had six eyes on its chest today. They all roamed over Judal.

 

“Three thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven.” the  _thing_ told him. It reached out for him as shamelessly as the night before, all six of its clawed hands eager to rest on him. Judal wondered if it got to touch very much besides the shadows and the walls. 

 

“You didn’t need to keep count…” he said softly. He squirmed slightly, freeing himself from the comforter just as the  _thing’s_  hands fell on him. They stroked his hair and rubbed his sides and Judal leaned into their palms.

 

“But it would make you happy.” the  _thing_  said, as if this was answer enough. “What would you like to count tonight?”

 

Judal sighed.

 

“I’m too tired to count.” he admitted. One of the  _thing’s_  hands gripped his hip and pulled him closer to its body. “I miss my sleeping pills.”

 

“She won’t take you to get more.”

 

“I know.”

 

“If you try to get them on your own, she’ll be very angry with you.”

 

“I won’t.”

 

“You should count something.”

 

“Do you have a name?”

 

The  _thing_  pet his cheek and smiled at him. One of its hands had slid under his nightshirt, kneading a bruise into his waist. Judal decided to count the days it would take to fade once he woke up.

 

“Hakuryuu.” it answered, the name like black frost in the air. 

 

“Eight letters.” Judal murmured. He yawned, one of Hakuryuu’s claws scraped over his incisor. 

 

“Count the lines in the letters.” Hakuryuu instructed him soothingly as his eyes fluttered shut.

 

During the day, Judal found himself counting more. He counted the flowers that reminded him of the ones growing out of Hakuryuu’s ribs that day, and the times he thought he saw him out of the corner of his eye, and how many times he messed up being “perfect”. Sometimes he counted how many strands of hair he pulled out or how many scratches he hid.

 

( He counted how long it took the bruise on his waist to fade. It went away two days before the scratch marks on his arms. He wished it hadn’t. )

 

He went to bed earlier now, where before he’d tried to find activities to occupy himself until his body screamed for rest. Hakuryuu slithered from the shadows as soon as he settled into bed, like he’d been waiting for him to decide to rest. ( In the fading sunlight, his face looked even more beautiful, and his innards looked even more grotesque. ) He would sit and talk with Judal, sing to him and stroke his thirty fingers over the scratches and the bruises and pet his bleeding scalp. He kissed everything that bled, staining his lips the color of the inside of his mouth.

 

Judal gnawed his lip one day until it was a bloody mess. That night, Hakuryuu kissed that too, until the blood was gone and he was kissing an open sore. Judal let him. He kissed back. He tasted his own blood and squirmed closer. Hakuryuu sang right against his ear that night, and in the morning Judal had more bruises on his side where his hands had kneaded marks into his skin. He counted them whenever he saw them.

 

“She scares me.” Judal murmured one night, tucked away in a cradle of six arms. 

 

Hakuryuu had begun to pull himself up onto Judal’s bed. He had been inching closer since the first night, and now he dragged his carcass-like form up onto the mattress every evening so Judal could nestle himself against his body of skin and bone. The thorns dug into him occasionally, and a sticky eye would blink open against his thigh sometimes, but Judal didn’t mind.

 

“She should.” the thing told him, pushing a kiss against his forehead. There was a gash there. She’d slammed his head into the counter. “You should leave this house.”

 

“Would you come with me?”

 

“You shouldn’t want that.”

 

“I do though.”

 

Hakuryuu kissed his mouth. Judal leaned up into him, eagerly parting his lips for the thing’s tongue to press inside. It was long and slimy, sliding around his own before pushing down his throat. He tasted like milk and honey, and his lips pulled into a smile when Judal sucked on his tongue. They pulled apart, Hakuryuu pulling his mouth free before slowly dragging his tongue away so Judal could watch it through half-lidded eyes. 

 

Judal pushed his hand between them, running his fingers over the places where roots pushed up from under Hakuryuu’s skin, where flesh stitched into plant, into bone. The thing shuddered all along its coiled body and pulled him closer, six hand pressing bruises and biting claws into his skin. 

 

“Can I count how long it takes you to kiss me again?”

 

“You’ll have to start over many times.” Hakuryuu warned, one of his hands already cradling Judal’s skull to drag him closer.

 

Mother was very strict now. She got mad over little things, things Judal couldn’t control. He counted the rooms in the manor, too many for how few people lived there. He counted the blank faced stares of the staff, their methodical movements all patterned if you looked long enough. The immaculate lawn looked like a gaping chasm, the driveway’s iron gates impassable and vast.

 

She found the bruises on him and demanded to know where he got them. What he’d seen. Judal told her he’d put them there himself, and was almost glad when she drove him to an attack, just so she could watch him scratch at his wrists until they bled. Maybe she believed him. He didn’t think she did.

 

( She left him muttering to herself, under her breath where she thought he couldn’t hear. Something about interference, about ungrateful boys, about how  _he_  should  _know better_. )

 

Judal went to bed without dinner or a bath, didn’t bother changing clothes, just crawled into bed and scoured the shadows. Hakuryuu wasn’t long. The sun was setting, it made his roses look as though they’d been painted a deeper crimson and his eyes look like purple fire. Judal reached out for him with desperate hands. 

 

“She  _touched_  you.” Hakuryuu hissed, his voice a loathing schism in the air. It tore open the atmosphere and inserted itself into a space it didn’t belong. “She  _touched_  you, she  _touched_  you, she put her filthy, rotten, vile, pestilent  _hands_ –”

 

Hakuryuu pulled himself up onto the mattress, and this time he didn’t bother with his usual courtesy. The entirety of his grotesque form tried to pile itself onto the mattress. Judal was pulled into a mess of thorns and bones, tried to steady himself and dug his nails into something fleshy and warm. It only made Hakuryuu hiss.

 

“Hakuryuu,” he whimpered, hands scrambling to find purchase, to cling onto something solid and real. They found Hakuryuu’s shoulders, dragged him closer to his fleshy torso. “Hakuryuu, Hakuryuu,  _Hakuryuu_ …”

 

He wasn’t listening. Six hands, six perfect hands Judal had memorized the number of lines on, the color of the irises on their palms, how much pressure each exerted to bruise his flesh, were tearing at his clothes. They came away in pieces and tatters and sometimes a little bit like they should have, but they were gone. Judal shivered and squirmed as thorns drew bloody lines into his thigh and bones dug into his back.

 

Hakuryuu’s hands were everywhere, mapping over the cuts and bruises dotting his body. He was so thin, fragile by comparison to the amalgamation of misplaced parts, at any moment Hakuryuu could break him. He touched instead, palms and fingertips and nails until he knew every mark on him. Snarls and hisses filtered from between his teeth as he touched on bruises he hadn’t left, scratches Judal hadn’t made, burn marks from hot metal that made his blue eyes  _burn_.

 

Judal squirmed in his arms, never to get away, always to drag himself closer to the  _thing_. When Hakuryuu pushed him away, his inspection not yet done, Judal choked out a sob.

 

“Hush, hush,” Hakuryuu breathed, hands still skimming over his skin. “It’s alright. It’s okay. I’ll make everything stop hurting, it will all just go away. I won’t let anything hurt you, not ever again.”

 

Mortification crept its way up into Judal’s chest, made itself comfortable next to his rapidly beating heart. He loved Hakuryuu’s hands, he loved them on him, loved how all six of them would pet and hold and grip at him however they liked. Only one or two had ever been on his bare skin at once, slipping beneath his shirt, under the leg of his pants, just enough to hold and bruise and mark. Now they were all over him, touching so gently, looking for the things they hadn’t left there.

 

Heat pooled in his belly. One hand slid along the softness of his inner thigh. Knuckles brushed his intimacy. Judal tried to push his thighs shut, draw his knees up, hide the flush of heat and arousal. 

 

Hakuryuu didn’t scold him for it. He cooed and purred, his arms pulling and kneading, body pulling into tighter coils around Judal’s slight frame. It only took one hand to coax his thighs apart, his mouth murmuring praise against Judal’s ear. His hands couldn’t seem to decide where they wanted to be, which one wanted to touch, fingers ghosting over heated flesh, palms rubbing against his arousal.

 

Hakuryuu laid him back against the coils of bone and roots, pressed his crimson mouth against Judal’s battered skin and left searing marks in its wake. Every kiss was another burn, every scrape of his teeth a neat razor’s cut. Judal trembled and tipped his head back, welcoming the lethal drag of pointed teeth against his throat.

 

Hands stroked over his weeping prick, coaxing his arousal to its peak only to pull from him and touch somewhere else. Those six palms were slick from the remnants of Judal’s want, from the blinking eyes embedded there, left trails of mess everywhere they touched. Some part of him was always being gripped, bitten,  _touched._ Touches he thought might drive him to insanity, pushing against his skin like they could become a part of him. 

 

Something pushed  _inside_. Stretched him open with delicious irreverence, easing inside him like it  _belonged_  there. 

Judal wailed and Hakuryuu kissed the tears from his cheeks, the sobs from his mouth. The more he writhed, the more entangled in Hakuryuu he became. His hair twisted around bone and vine and every time he tried to steady himself, his hands sunk in among unsorted organs. Hakuryuu pulled his arms up until Judal buried his hands in his dark hair and held on like it was his only tether to sanity. It wasn’t. Hakuryuu was making him crazy, pushing in, in,  _in_ , deeper and deeper until Judal felt like his body wasn’t his own anymore.

 

The drag against his innards made his head swim. The compliments purred and crooned against his ear made him dizzy. (  _Such a pretty boy, so precious, so beautiful, so good for me, only for me_  ) Fingers pushed past his lips and he licked and suckled at them, yearning for more, to be less, to become the thing Hakuryuu wanted. Every precipice of pleasure was outdone by another, and another, and another, until the mounting madness drove him to incoherency. There was nothing but the smell of roses and the burn of pleasure.

 

Hakuryuu coaxed him through orgasm after orgasm. Some of them were loud, his body arching and his mouth gaping wide as he painted his chest with semen. Some were dragged from him before he was ready, overwhelming his sensitive body, his scream strangled by a long tongue down his throat, fingers hooked behind his teeth. His dry orgasms left him quivering in Hakuryuu’s arms, overwhelmed again and again and again. At some point, he lost focus on his autonomy, began to think of himself as an extension of his monster. With every orgasm, Hakuryuu screamed with him, so it almost felt like they were the same.

 

In the morning, Hakuryuu was still there.

 

He kissed the bites he had littered over Judal’s neck, blew softly on the bruises he’d sucked over his swollen nipples. His hands rubbed and massaged at sore muscles and aching hips, one left to stroke tender patterns along his inner thighs. If Judal had had any energy left in him, he would have grown heated again, pressed up against Hakuryuu and begged for more. But he was sore and tired, content to be lavished in affection and nothing more.

 

Halfway through the day, someone tried to come in. Judal spared half a thought to who it was, a maid or a butler, but all their insides probably looked the same. Hakuryuu tore them open the minute they opened the door, pressing kisses to Judal’s swollen mouth as he did. With his tail, he flicked the corpse back out into the hall and shut the door, dragging the bone against the carpet to wipe away the blood. 

 

Mother did not  _like_  the new marks on Judal’s throat, on his wrists, on his whole body. There were nail marks carved into his back, bruises on his thighs and his hips, bite marks everywhere,  _everywhere_. She looked so livid whenever she saw them, it tore right through her pretty facade. But she never raised a hand against him again, never tried to touch him while they were in the house. Like she knew better.

 

(  _She did._  )

 

She found other ways to hurt him, to control him. He ate less and slept more, curled up in the coils of his lover’s body. Judal gave up counting the days and counted the stars in Hakuryuu’s eyes instead. For every time she hurt him, he’d spend another hour braiding Hakuryuu’s roses into his hair. Every servant she sent after him, every corpse she had to do away with like it had never been there, was another evening Judal spent arched, four hands dragging over his chest, two holding his thighs, Hakuryuu’s impossibly long tongue worshiping his sex.

 

One day she started slipping things into his food. Judal told Hakuryuu and the next morning mother told him they needed to go out for the day. When they returned, there was an all new waitstaff, and that night the roses dripped with blood. 

 

“I hate this place.” Judal confessed, his fingers tracing the rim of an eye on Hakuryuu’s stomach. “I don’t know how to leave.”

 

“If I kill her, you can run.”

 

“You won’t come with me.”

 

“I shouldn’t.”

 

“Then I’ll stay.”

 

Hakuryuu tangled his fingers in Judal’s midnight hair, dragging him up until he could push a kiss against his mouth. Judal dragged his tongue over the needle sharp teeth inside Hakuryuu’s mouth, savoring the groan when he could taste his blood. ( Sixty-eight teeth, all sharp, all pressed into his skin to mark, mark,  _mark_. )

 

“If you stay here, you’ll become like me.” Hakuryuu breathed against his lips, pulling him closer. His hold was tender, not passionate or bruising, like he was worried Judal didn’t know he cared. 

 

“Is that so bad? If I were like you, couldn’t we be together? Be free?”

 

He shook his head, pulled Judal closer, tucked his head under his chin.

 

“She failed once.” his monster sighed, his voice that painful hum of reminiscence. “I was to be her perfect creation. Her perfect son. But she failed, and so I am this thing instead.”

 

Judal pressed kisses to his monster’s throat, tasted his heartbeat under his lips. Hakuryuu had pulled aside the mess of organs within his countless ribs once and showed him his heart. It glowed a warm red and beat in time with Judal’s no matter what he did. He’d spent hours just petting it. 

 

“You’re worried with me, she’ll succeed.” he pressed.

 

“If she doesn’t, I don’t know what you’ll become. If she does, I will lose you for eternity.” 

 

Hakuryuu buried his face against Judal’s hair.

 

“Before you, I existed only to torment her. Remind her of her failures. Plague her every waking moment if I could. But you, you are mine, and I cannot fail you, I cannot be without you. I do not  _want_  to be without you.”

 

“...What if  _you_  remake me instead?”

 

Judal squirmed, pulled back enough he could look up into Hakuryuu’s five beautiful eyes. They blinked at him, all focused on him and him alone, just like always.

 

“If you do it, you’ll know how to make me just right, won’t you?”

 

“You’d want me to pick you apart, a piece at a time, and stitch you back together in the image I desire?”

 

“More than anything in the world.”

 

Hakuryuu’s hands were already gripping at him, dragging him against his monster’s torso. They were so expressive, his hands, even if his mouth was persed and he tried to seem unconvinced his hands were already pushing new bruises into Judal’s skin, easing  _inside_  him. Hakuryuu pecked his lips, sliding another finger into his body so that Judal would give him one of his pretty moans, the pleasant burn of his body being stretched clouding his thoughts.

 

“So it shall be then.”

 

They planned it perfectly. Hakuryuu disappeared during the days, collecting what he needed though Judal never saw much of what that was ( sometimes he saw flowers, sometimes he feathers ). Judal kept acting  _perfect_. He smiled when mother wanted him to, nodded and played along, but never touched a morsel she put in front of him, never drank a drop. More of the staff went missing. The rest kept moving, as if in a daze.

 

On the day of, Judal locked himself in his room. He had bathed in rose oil and brushed his hair to a silky sheen, dressed in a soft silk robe Hakuryuu had left at the end of his bed. It had a dragon embroidered on it, and faded lettering on the tag almost seemed to read a familiar name. Judal felt beautiful in the robe with his hair down, a waterfall of ebony around him. He waited for Hakuryuu and when his monster came, dragging himself from the shadows, he was smiling.

 

They made love again, in the bed they both had shared since the night they began to speak. Judal counted the kisses, the orgasms, the times Hakuryuu said his name. He lost count of the times they both said  _I love you._

At the end of it, Hakuryuu cleaned him up with his tongue and a scrap of the sheets. The full moon hung heavy outside the window, eerie light casting its cool glow over the entire room. The shadows were long as Hakuryuu helped Judal back into the pretty silk robe, twenty fingers combing through his hair. He picked him up, cradling him in his arm and Judal had never felt so small and safe in his entire life.

 

Hakuryuu slithered from the bed, uncoiling himself leisurely from where he had been laid, unhurried, gazing lovingly at the human in his arms. They shared soft kisses as he moved, crossing the room an inch at a time, back to the corner from which he had first come. Judal clung to him, frightened, excited, elated, and Hakuryuu reminded him to breathe. 

 

They descended into the shadows together, the long coils of Hakuryuu’s skeletal body disappearing like a snake into sand, and then the room was empty.


End file.
